For my last Vermont drive I decided to make a loop south
from Killington to several of the village in southern Windsor County and
northern Windham County that make lists of Vermont’s most beautiful villages .
Weston in the Green Mountains is known for the Weston Playhouse, a few museums
(which were closed on the Tuesday of my visit), and the original location of
The Vermont Country Store. The last was my primary interest in the town, a
large wooden building filled with all the quaint and silly clichés of New
England country living. But it’s not the tools and furnishings and decorative
items that interest me. I do a quick loop through those parts of the store to
survey it all in an, ”I came, I saw, I didn’t spend any money kind of a way”. It’s the free samples of the wide variety of
foods available, everything from maple syrup to cheeses to dips and crackers to
spreads and pretzels to sauces and marinades to chips and cookies and chocolate
and fudge. Hey, I can make a lunch out of this! And I can justify filling my tummy
for free since I bought quite a few goodies to take home as souvenirs of my
fortnight in Vermont.

Grafton looks like it’s only a few miles to the southeast on
the map, but it’s actually quite a journey from Weston . I followed the signs on
some back roads and was quite excited when the pavement ran out. Wow, you don’t
find that very often in the Northeast! 
The well-graded unpaved road twisted and turned for about ten miles
through hilly woods to the village of Grafton. Grafton is almost too cute and
too perfect to be a real working village. It has a nice inn and small public buildings
and a general store, but almost feels like a New England museum village. I
checked out the stats for many of the towns in the area on Wikipedia and it
looks like the official population of many of the villages in Windsor and Windham
counties has declined precipitously over the last half century or so. If that’s
the case, why aren’t more houses abandoned looking? On the contrary, everything looks so picture
perfect. I think what’s happened is ever more of the houses in and around the
cutesiest villages have been purchased as second homes by more affluent city
people who do not technically get counted in population figures.

While the western side of Vermont and the Lake Champlain
Valley in particular still have a great deal of farming, the farms are few and
far between nowadays on the rockier eastern slopes of the Green Mountains . Like
most of New England, around here it’s pretty much all thick forest and not a
lot of agricultural landscapes.

I made a short stop in Chester, another one of those “most
beautiful villages”, on my way to Plymouth but didn’t stop for long because I
wanted to visit the Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site. This is another one of
those “for old time sake” stops because it’s a place I visited with my parents
in 1989 on a long weekend fall trip to Vermont. President Calvin Coolidge was
born and grew up on a farm in quite remote Plymouth Notch, a place he returned
to many times during summers even though he built his political career before
becoming president in Massachusetts. The site would seem to be of national
historical significance, so I’m not sure why it’s a state site rather than a
unit of the National Park System. Anyway, it's been long enough since my last
visit with my parents that it practically seemed new to me, and there have
apparently been significant restorations since 1989, including Coolidge Hall, the
so-called “1924 Summer White House” when the president speak some weeks in
Plymouth Notch . The site includes a museum on Coolidge’s life, the president’s
birth place house, the house where he grew up and took the oath of office in
1923 on news of President Harding’s death, the village church, store, barns,
and even a working cheese factory just like in the days of Coolidge’s
residence. The stop brought back memories of my last visit there with my mom
and dad twenty seven years ago.